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A natural human is easily humbled, but a god is difficult to humble.
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PNG > West Sepik Province > Abau Language > Middle Dialect > Sino Village
Sino is the name of a village in the Abau tribe. Missionary teams need to live pretty close to each other (in the same village) to keep collaborative work going quickly and smoothly, so many times, if there are many villages in a tribe, each needs to be evaluated in order to determine which will meet the needs of the team best. There are several things to consider before choosing one to move into.
Language > Dialect
There are three dialects to the Abau language group, an “upper” “middle” and “lower” and several villages in each group. Sino is situated in the “middle” dialect and the missionaries have chosen this spot for many reasons. Thinking long-term, the team that moved into this village knew they would need a steady flow of supplies and support for the next 20ish years and a spot on the Sepik would make this task easier with a decent boat, which would be a relatively small long term investment. At the time, there were no plans for an airstrip, and so acces to the river was going to be essential. Situating a team in the middle dialect made the most long-term sense, as a future church plant would be able to equally as easily evangelize villages from the upper and lower dialects when the church grew strong enough to sustain its own evangelistic program.Years after the work has started, there is now an amazing and young indigenous church in the Abau language group. Sino is the village that Frank and Mirjam Tertel have been living in for the last 12 years.
The Sino village in the Abau tribe is located on the Sepik River. As a matter of fact, as I write these words, I can hear the rushing water of the sepik RIGHT beneath my veranda - I am sitting here overlooking the Sepik, and can see clear across to the bushy jungle on the other side. The Sepik is a 1,000 mile long highway of sorts - that anyone with a dug out log and a 25 horsepower outboard motor can travel with ease(you don’t even need a motor to go down stream, towards “civilization”). This link to civilization makes all of the people along the river more exposed to the outside world… Matches, salt, tattered clothing, machetes, axes, ramen noodles… all products of industrialization that have crept their way into these uttermost ends. Not a day goes by that you don’t hear the hum of an outbboard motor working to push a dugout canoe up the river toward the nearest town, Vanimo. We are situated pretty close to the border Indonesia shares with PNG… The Sepik winds its wa
y across this line in the “sand” and then a hundred or so miles later, back into our country again well south of us. -
This is a test of sorts…
So remember how I told you about all the weird email hoops I have to
jump through?
This my friends, if you ever see this, means I will be able to post to
tumblr through all those weird hoops.I hope you are seeing this.
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Here we go... →
So… Tomorrow bright and early, we are going tithe Sino tribe. For 2ish
months. Awesome.Read about our trip a bit at:
There is, however, something I did not share on our ministry blog… And
that is that we are having our first PNG visitors come to visit us - in the
bush!Kyle Springer and Justing Todd are some rad dudes I knew from
cornerstoneweb.org in Livermore, CA, but now they are shredding in Perth
Australia. They will be trying to snake some Rockstar Energy drinks through
customs for us (we’re seriously Jonesin’ for some of that magic!) as well
as just enjoying the tropical paradise that is coastal PNG!All that to say… Hopefully I can rope Kyle into posting my surf Video and
maybe some other good stuff to the internett when he touches down again in
AU… while we are living in the land of no connectivity.We’re pretty jazzed about this trip… And cannot wait to see what church
planting in Sino is looking like!Going to try to post to Tumblr via email… But might not work through the
satphone and the weird way we need to send and receive Internet. For you
tech needs out there… I will be using a really ghetto cross platform
application called UUPlus which I am pretty sure uses some gnarly
proprietary communication protocol together with a dynamic compression
algorithm to compress all traffic over my 2-15kbps (!) satphone data modem.
UUPlus sets up an account for me on their own server, and I tell it to
fetch mail from a POP server. UUPlus’s server filters out dumb attachments
and rich text, and when I fire up my modem and UUPlus, I make sure my mail
client is pointed to localhost to pick up new messages (because the UUPlus
app sets up a local mail server), then I terminate my data call upon
completion of receiving, saving me Buku bones on those not-cheap satphone
minutes. Pretty much the same thing for outgoing mail.Pretty ghetto and weird huh? I had to drop some cash on LittleSnitch app to
keep anything else from trying to claim my seriously limited bandwidth, and
pay the UUPlus people 90$ for a three month license! If anyone knows of any
alternatives… I’d love to hear them, but you might have to call me on my
satphone, or get on the HF radio! -
Nimo - Day 2+ →
Images from the Rest of my bush trip.
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My brothers and me. →
Plenty of fun old and potentially embarrassing pictures surface to find the light of day when family events and the inevitable slideshows come around. This album hosted on facebook is full of nostalgia for me.
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Despite the clarity here, i like the previous photograph better. I like that you have to look a little bit for the crab… Just like i did.
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Love this image, from the same photo shoot.
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Black Balance.
So i saw these photos posted somewhere (http://www.navisphotography.com/filter/personal#2366732/OCCUPY-SF-PROTESTS) a while back of the Occupy SF protesting… And now I’m on a black balance binge. I love how blue the blacks are in these photos - it seems to fill in shadows more ‘realistically’… On the prowl for an iOS app that’ll let me adjust this from my phone, and a bit disappointed in snapseed for the omission…
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(another) Morning view from surf club point.
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Morning view from surf club point.
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Cant wait to get this vid out there, there was NO Color adjustments made to the entire thing. NONE. Amd every frame looked this pretty. SO much beautiful footage.
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Another screen grab - the lighting WAS awesome, but the GoPro seems to tweak white balance a bit, and tries really hard to make things look really pretty. It does pretty well, actually.
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A screen grab of some of that beautiful footage…
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I tweeted recently that i was going to take some vididdio of some surf bros here in PNG, and have to say… The footage could not have been much better. It was a great sesh, and i put together a 12 minute eye-candy reel set to some new Tycho groove love. Buttery smooth 60to24p slowmo magic- we had perfect light, and in such conditions, the GoPro really makes it happen! Will post when I can.
